


Smoke and Ashes

by luchia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-20
Updated: 2011-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-15 19:44:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luchia/pseuds/luchia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only person who helped Lestrade find his little boy was a half-dead junkie in a condemned townhouse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smoke and Ashes

“If you’re looking for your son,” said the junkie sitting against the wall, “he’s been dead for fifteen hours.” The junkie wasn’t even looking at him. “Overdose. He’s in the attic bedroom.”

Adam Lestrade had been thirteen years old.

“Thank you,” Lestrade said. Shock had numbed him, he knew, but without the numbness he never would have made it up the stairs, never would have been able to look at his little boy’s body and brush hair off his cold forehead and wonder if somehow this was his own doing.

When he dialed 999 and the police came inside to take away his son and his deadness, he made sure they took the junkie and every other person in the decaying old house with them.

*

Lestrade starts smoking, and nobody says a word about it.

*

The funeral is scarcely attended, with most of Adam’s friends from school too young and shocked and embarrassed to go watch his boy be lowered into the ground. His wife’s been dead for two years and they’ve never been a religious family, so it is Inspector Lestrade who people come to the funeral for, not Adam. Not a mourning father with nothing left.

Anderson and Donovan stay behind when the others have paid their required social dues to a coworker’s tragedy, but deep down he can’t help but hold a grudge. He had to find his son before it was too late, and neither of them contributed anything more than a hand on the shoulder and a quiet consoling lie.

The only person who helped him find his little boy was a half-dead junkie in a condemned townhouse.

*

The next time the junkie gets pulled into the holding cells, Lestrade visits. He knows the man’s name is Sherlock Holmes, but there’s something about the name that just can’t stick to the skeletal creature behind bars. The junkie’s eyes are sharp and vicious and bruised.

“Do you remember me?” Lestrade asks, since the junkie doesn’t seem particularly inclined to starting a conversation.

“I know who you are,” the junkie replies. It’s not a straight answer, but for some reason Lestrade wasn’t expecting one. “And you won’t get any answers about your son’s death from me. Or anyone or anything else, as there are no real questions.”

Much of Lestrade wants to be furious. Even more of him wants to just sit down and put his head in his hands. “And what do you mean by that?”

“I mean that his death was boring and predictable,” the junkie states. “His story is the same as thousands of others.” He turns his head away, sighing. “Dull.”

The junkie’s words are brutal, but honest. It makes Lestrade feel sick. It makes Lestrade wonder if it’s addiction that’s turned the junkie into a heartless bastard, or if the man inside has always been that way. “If you can’t give me answers about Adam, you can answer my other question. How did you know I was his father?”

The junkie looks at him, giving him something close to a smirk. “I know because you had the same eyes. Same color, shape, and expressions. Your wife died two years ago. A sudden death, wasn’t it? Most likely a car crash.”

“Don’t you dare talk about her,” Lestrade snaps.

The junkie sighs. “A reaction like that, and you wonder why your son ran off.”

“Shut up,” Lestrade shouts, barely restraining himself from pacing, or pulling out a cigarette, or unlocking the cell just to punch the bastard. “How do you know these things? What are you, some kind of psychic?”

The junkie lets out a short, harsh laugh. “Please. I _observe_. It’s not my fault the rest of you are too slow to understand.”

Lestrade wants to hate him, but he’s too tired to manage it. “If you’re so smart, why are you a junkie?”

“Because I’m _bored_ ,” the junkie says, slumping even further against the wall.

A door opens, unnoticed until he hears Donovan say, “Sir? We heard shouting.” She’s watching the junkie with all due suspicion. Lestrade hasn’t lost his temper with anyone since Adam died.

“I’m fine,” Lestrade says, feeling the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. He ignores the junkie and walks towards Donovan, even though he knows the man’s still watching him. He doubts the junkie ever stops watching. “Any progress on the Hadley murders?”

Lestrade sees the way the junkie perks up at the words. It makes him all the more grateful when the door clicks shut behind him.

*

His flat is so quiet that he thinks about burning it down. Lestrade thinks about the word _closure_ and wonders what genius thought it up. He thinks about a twisted genius twisting himself up even more, too smart to survive. He thinks about the rebellious rock posters on Adam’s walls and the barely-packed-up stuffed dog he put away when Lucy’s car swerved its way into another car on a rainy night.

He moves up to two packs of cigarettes a day, and knows exactly why he does it. All he has to do is read the big white label displayed prominently on the side.

*

“Maybe you should take some time off,” Anderson says quietly, just two rooms away from the body of a twelve year old boy with the same dyed-black hair as Adam. It’s the second little boy they’ve found, in as many months.

They start rebelling so young these days. Hell, they start doing _everything_ so young these days.

He looks Anderson in the eye when he talks to him. He always does. “No,” Lestrade says, and puts his gloves on.

His job is all he has left, and even that he doesn’t seem able to do right.

*

When they find the fourth boy – he would have turned fourteen in two days and his parents had been wrapping presents for him when Lestrade delivered the news and his mother had tape all over her fingers – the junkie is waiting outside, twitching on the other side of the police line.

“Go away,” Lestrade tells him.

“I can help and you know it,” the junkie says. “Let me in and I can give you more information on the serial killer than you could gather in two months and two more little boys.”

His hands clench into fists, his jaw shut so tight it hurts. “You’re a drug addict.”

“And still smarter than you,” the junkie says, watching him with feverish eyes. “Let me in.” When Lestrade doesn’t move, the junkie smirks. “Let me in, and I’ll tell you the last thing your son ever said.”

God help him.

“You have two minutes,” Lestrade says, raising the tape. He leads the junkie past the constables and into the alley and past Donovan and Anderson and hands the junkie a pair of gloves. The junkie’s shaking so hard Lestrade wonders whether it’s withdrawal or some perverse excitement. “His name’s-”

“Inconsequential,” the junkie says, crouching next to the little body and just…looking. And then he starts taking the boy’s shoe off.

“Get your hands off-” Anderson shouts.

“Shut up,” the junkie says, looking at the sole. “I’m thinking.”

Anderson is moving forward, and Lestrade finds himself stopping him. “What the hell’s going on here, _sir_? You’re letting some random man destroy a crime scene.”

“Shut up for a minute and a half,” Lestrade says, and it surprises Anderson so much that he actually obeys.

When the junkie looks back up, he’s jittery and grinning and looks higher than any airplane could ever manage. “Your killer is a woman in her late twenties who likes to drop everything in her bag and have unsuspecting schoolboys help her gather her things. Look for someone with a history of plastic surgery and a gym membership, if she’s not an aerobics instructor of some sort.”

Lestrade swallows. “If you’re just making this up-”

“I’m not,” the junkie says, and walks them through his deductions.

Lestrade finds himself thinking of the junkie as a mad genius of a fool named Sherlock Holmes.

*

Adam’s bed is covered in a blue comforter with footballs on it. Lestrade hasn’t been able to stop himself from changing the sheets regularly, from opening the window just to see some movement in the room, even if it’s just the curtains.

Sherlock looks absurd on top of the bed, sweating and shaking and smiling wickedly at the ceiling. “I’m not your son and I don’t need your _help_ and you’re an idiot,” he says as Lestrade starts up on his thirty-third cigarette of the day.

“I’m aware of all those things, thank you,” Lestrade says.

“You’re a disgrace to suicidal morons everywhere, with your passive attempt at killing yourself through smoking,” Sherlock says.

“I know that, too,” Lestrade tells him, watching the junkie’s hands grab onto the bedspread. “What’d he say?”

“He said ‘That’s okay with me.’”

Lestrade nods, inhaling. Exhaling. “Will you tell me why he said it?”

Sherlock is quiet for a moment. “I told him he’d overdose from that much.”

Lestrade is silent save for the suck and blow of nicotine and smoke. It adds a rhythm to the shudders in Sherlock’s body, like some suicidal external heartbeat. Adam’s curtains shift in the breeze.

“Thank you,” Lestrade says, and puts his cigarette out.


End file.
